Wow, how did I miss this thread for so long?
"The fact a government is anti-Catholic doesn`t mean its power is unlawful. You have to distinguish the legitimacy of the government from the legitimacy of its laws.
Catholic countries like Spain (under Franco and Pius XII) joined the UN..."
You aren't making me any more fond of Pius XII in this thread, let me tell you Cristian. Anyway, Franco also de-Catholicized the government due to a request from Paul VI, does that make what he did right?
The argument going on here between what represents God's permissive will and his positive will is a hard one to settle. Apparently the Jєωιѕн exile in Babylon was not just due to his permissive will, but was his actual command. I may be wrong, but one man who tried to stop the Jєωιѕн captivity was treated by God as a false prophet, while Ezekiel accepted the punishment and became a true prophet.
Therefore other kinds of exile may express God's positive will, I don't know. I'm no expert on that subject. What I can say is that, though even the exile in Babylon may have been part of God's positive will, that doesn't mean he approved of Babylon! Rather, putting the Jews there, or allowing them to be cast away there, was his punishment of them. But if it was his positive will to send them there, it was also his positive will that they suffer while they were, to the point where they wouldn't even sing their usual hymns and canticles because they were lamenting their fate.
Yet you would have us believe, it seems, that God doesn't just allow Israel, or positively will that the Jews re-take Israel as a punishment to the CHRISTIANS, but is Himself pro-Israel... And that is where you go too far by any standard. Might as well say he's pro-Babylon or pro-Vatican II.
I must confess that you and others have what sounds like a good point when you say that the Jews no more "stole" Israel than other nations who conquered on the killing fields did. That's hard to argue with, except that they didn't win in a fair fight, but through skulduggery and trickery engineered with their vast financial resources which they used to buy up the governments and install their puppets in places like the UN. That is what makes it especially nauseating. The boundaries of Europe were often in flux, so there was nothing shocking or untoward or undiplomatic about Spain trying to take a piece of France, or vice versa, but for one ethnic group to simply insert themselves somewhere that they hadn't been for a long time, well, that is unusual, let's put it that way. Still, it does come down to might makes right, as has happened many times before.
Where you wander into very novel territory is when you try to fit all these Old Testament prophecies into a future conversion of the Jews. That is downright disturbing and you are really going out on a limb of your own here. Eamon quoted the Douay-Rheims gloss on the Ezekiel passage, and you say you have other books that interpret it as referring to the future conversion of the Jews. Yet you didn't cite any of these books... Are they, perhaps, written by JEWS? Just wondering. Because as for this --
Ez. 36, 24 "For I will take you from among the Gentiles, and will gather you together out of all the countries, and will bring you into your own land."
It refers to spiritual Israel, the Catholics, who will be formed from among the Gentiles, just as Eamon shows it has been interpreted. Whatever other source you have, it won't beat his. It also plays on the Babylonian captivity. The reason for "nations" in the plural could just be poetic, Babylonian standing in for all the nations that surrounded this tiny group of chosen people.
Your interpretation presumes God is actually guiding the Jews RIGHT NOW and that He is using His power to aid the Jews in their capture of Israel, which is just plain obscene when you consider how this was done and how ungodly their methods are.
Topic: Israel claims to be surprised by Palestine uprising (Read 9539 times)